Great news for all Raspberry Pi owners, especially those hoping to keep their children interesting in the device. The hit game Minecraft has been ported over the Pi and is available to download now at no cost from the Minecraft Pi Edition website. We gave it a quick go and were quite impressed.

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I've been rather pleased with the enthusiasm shown by my eldest for doing more than simply playing Club Penguin or Moshi Monsters on the computer. We had a very productive time with the visual programming tool Scratch, culminating in the brilliant win of her coming up with a way of using it that I hadn't thought of.

This weekend, she turned to me as we were playing Skylanders and said that she wanted to have a go at programming. Sounds good, I said, what do you have in mind. Oh just something like Skylanders she replied. The wonderful thing is, that this might not be so far out of reach as I first thought.

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Not everything you read on the internet is accurate, or even true. Here are five common pitfalls it's easy to avoid including hoaxes on Wikipedia and email scams.

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You will be targeted by fraudsters and conmen whether you live in London, Paris, Spain or Barbados. You may get conned when you holiday in Turkey, Thailand or Majorca. Scammers will target you regardless of age, sex or colour. The simple fact is that criminals do not discriminate.

They have no morals, no scruples, no hearts. All they want is your money, your valuables or your personal data at any price.

So it is vital you understand how these heartless criminals operate so that you can take steps to safeguard yourself and your family and keep your bank balance and identity intact.

In 2009 the Metropolitan Police shut down 1,200 bogus websites selling fake products. In 2012, during the run-up to Christmas, they closed 2,000 sites on evidence provide by domain name registrar Nominet. That blitz will continue in 2013, but it doesn't mean you are safe.

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As fun as Club Penguin is for spending some quality time with my eldest (largely consisting of her spending coins that I earn in games), I've been hoping to encourage her to do something more constructive.

The visual programming program Scratch (download Scratch here) has captured her interest more than I'd hoped. Last weekend we had a go at the 'chasing' program I came up with while reviewing Scratch. Not only did we get something that worked but I discovered a way of using Scratch I hadn't previously considered.

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Lots of Computeractive readers have asked us about taking courses in computing so in November we published an article on how to choose a computer course. Prior to publication we asked the members of our Facebook page if they had taken courses and, if so, whether they found them useful.

Since then Paul Thomas has been in touch to share his experience. "Starting out as a complete novice at computing three years ago at the age of 63, I enrolled on a flexible learning course at college. My first introduction to computing was a course called ‘Skills for Life', which covered the basics: email, finding information on the internet and word processing using Word 2003.

"From there I carried on to a Computer Literacy and Information Technology course and then European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) Extra and ECDL Advanced. I learnt to use Powerpoint, Word and Excel 2007. The training books were provided and there were no fixed classes as such. You booked a computer for two hours and you were in a room with 40 or so computers.

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